Literacy instruction is an important component of educator preparation programs. Since many students are identified as having learning disabilities in reading, it is important that all teachers are knowledgeable and have proficient phonics skills. Recent research has indicated that many teachers are lacking the skills necessary for appropriate…

Pre-service teachers (PSTs) need sound Knowledge About Language (KAL), both for their own professional communication and for their teaching practice. In the longer term, enhanced KAL will benefit our graduates in their implementation of the Australian Curriculum. This paper reports on work with First Year PSTs at one Australian university. We…

Hearing loss adversely affects language and literacy development and reading difficulties of deaf and hard of hearing (d/Dhh) students are well documented by a large body of research. Effective instructional strategies that employ evidence-based strategies to support the reading development of d/Dhh students are required. Therefore, the purpose of…

Duff, Mengoni, Bailey and Snowling ("Journal of Research in Reading," 38: 109-123; 2015) evaluated the sensitivity and specificity of the phonics screening check against two reference standards. This report aims to correct a minor data error in the original article and to present further analysis of the data. The methods used are…

The decades-long and contentious debate over how students are taught to read centers around the role that phonics and alphabetic code-related skills have in reading instruction. Some claim that these skills are not prioritized in most elementary classrooms because teacher education programs do not adequately prepare preservice teachers (PSTs) to…

Educators and researchers have been fighting the reading wars for the last century, with battles see-sawing literacy instruction in American schools from phonics to whole language and, most recently, back to phonics again. Over the last decade, 32 states and the District of Columbia have adopted new "science of reading" laws that require…

Learning to read is a process that begins well before children commence formal schooling and well before children learn to decode print. Children's early reading skills are, first and foremost, foundationally contingent upon children's oral language and phonological awareness proficiencies -- skills that can be mapped across a continuum of…

Advances in neurobiological research have created new opportunities for understanding and exploring dyslexia. The purpose of this article is to (a) provide a straightforward, although not overly simplified, overview of neurological research on dyslexia and (b) make connections between neurological research and classroom interventions for students…

The purpose of this article is to look anew at the concepts of reading, reading development, and reading research as they exist beyond the boundaries of the "science of reading" controversy. The context for this reconceptualization is reading in the digital age and the challenges that today's readers confront daily. Those challenges…

The author reviews theory and research by Ehri and her colleagues to document how a scientific approach has been applied over the years to conduct controlled studies whose findings reveal how beginners learn to read words in and out of text. Words may be read by decoding letters into blended sounds or by predicting words from context, but the way…

The purpose of this study was to provide data about the effects of early literacy instructional methods on later elementary reading performance. This study compared students who were introduced to reading through a synthetic phonics approach in contrast to students who were introduced to reading through an analytic phonics approach. Quantitative…

The purpose of the Teacher Prep Review is to guarantee teachers have expertise in reading instruction (as well as other essential areas NCTQ assesses) before being trusted to teach children to read. By regularly reviewing the reading coursework provided by nearly 700 elementary teacher preparation programs, the National Council on Teacher Quality…

The purpose of this research study was to prove if students who are intellectually disabled can obtain phonemic awareness and the ability to read independently with the use of Wilson's Fundations. This study aims to investigate if students who have been identified as intellectually disabled are able to gain phonemic awareness by using Wilson's…

This transnational comparative study between Costa Rica and the United States provides an in-depth understanding of the similarities and differences of the early literacy practices of educators in the Pre-Kindergarten to Kindergarten classroom settings. Drawing upon Costa Rica's curricular approach to Early Childhood Education, based upon the…

This study investigates the impact of the MindPlay Reading program on student literacy achievement in Dayton City Schools, Ohio, during the 2021-2022 academic year. A correlational analysis was conducted in collaboration with LXD Research to examine the relationship between MindPlay usage and student outcomes on literacy assessments. The sample…